While I lack the time to GM I took a look at the framework doc that's being worked on. I hope you don't mind if I kibitz a little bit on it. Googleshng expressed a concern that if you are 'doing the Firewall thing' any given scenario should be about preventing something that could cause extinction of transhumanity within a week. First, I think that the idea that all scenarios have to revolve around Firewall is probably a mistake. Sure, they are written as a big thread that runs through all of EP but I think that there are plenty of other scenarios that can be run. As an example, the character concept I'm working on is an Ultimate genehacker (we aren't all just soldiers, after all) who is currently teaching classes at TAU (both in genetics and in Ultimate history and philosophy). He could easily be called on by the Ultimates for some special mission, be involved in some event at the University (an exsurgent outbreak in one of the labs), called on to join a gatecrashing expedition as a scientific member, or contacted by Firewall due to his skills as a combat medic. Secondly, I would suggest that the GMs talk about their plans with each other and keep them a little bit more scaled back. Yes, Firewall deals with nasty threats that could wipe out transhumanity, but there should usually be more time than a week before things go completely off the rails. How often are characters called in to find out what happened to the last operatives who were looking into something? Do you really think that there's no one to be called in after they go missing? That isn't to say that the character's actions don't affect the world. A failure on the part of the characters might mean that an exsurgent infection that could have been nipped in the bud isn't and instead of dozens of people needing to be reinstantiated from year old backups now an entire community needs to be nuked and thousands will need to be reinstantiated. If the backup team fails at that it could mean tens of thousands will need to be wiped and now Firewall will need to devote thousands of manhours for individuals who might have been missed and gone to ground. Failure is still a big deal, but it isn't the end of transhumanity. Lastly, there was talk about various events covering different amounts of time. Based on experiences with other situations similar to what is being proposed for here I would suggest some sort of effort is taken to keep things roughly in sync. Don't create scenarios in which weeks and months of time need to pass without anything occuring in between. Big, long overarching plots are fine but have them broken into smaller chunks. Then say something like each RL week is roughly 2 weeks of game time. I say roughly because if a session needs to wrap up and then continue next week while people are exploring the abandoned scum barge or something then the next week it picks right back up at the same point, not two weeks later. However, at the end of that session all the characters would have 4 weeks worth of 'downtime' for doing whatever it is that they want to do (as opposed to 2 weeks, which is typical). This needs to be done because there are a lot of things that can be done using this downtime that can be pretty significant such as favors resetting and blueprints can be programmed. Letting people just freely burn time on these activities means some people will get enormous amounts of time to do so while others will get very little, depending on who is GMing.
